Age of Empires II Tips

Advance to imperial age and research everything. Make your max population go to 200. Than befriend an opponent making them your ally. Use the food, wood, stone and gold cheats. Go to your Siege Workshop, Castle, Barracks, Archery Range and Stable. Set the gather point in your allies village. Than go to all your military buildings and make as many guys as possible. Wait until all your units are in the city. Than switch your diplomacy with them to enemy your guys will pillage their village. When they give you your last chance switch them to ally. When they have said you are a good ally or something like that switch them back to enemy repeat until won game

this is a (risky but useful) tactic. you get your scout cavalry to attack the town center ONCE. as long as you are neutral, they will not attack you back unless you attack again. this disrupts their economy and help you because you will have scouted a little. this is, however, quite risky. you could do it with a less valuable unit that is not a military unit

When you start the game the game in a hard level, the enemy might attack pretty quickly and destroy your village before you have a chance to build your resources. Just enter all the food,wood,stone and gold cheats and advance to the imperial age. Then send a couple of your villagers (and units to guard the villagers) to a blank corner of the map and build a wall around one of the villagers.If your village gets destroyed just destroy the stone wall and get the villager in there to build a new and secret base. This will confuse your enemys in to tyhinking you are destroyed.

If you want to defeat yourself, but don't want to use one of the other "losing" cheats (like "resign",) just start a regicide game, type "natural wonders" in the chat box, hit enter, and then use an animal (like a boar, wolf, or jaguar) to kill "your" king (which you will have lost control of) just like you kill an enemy unit.

Note: Natural Wonders is a cheat to lose control of your other people and switch to controlling animals. If you click the technology tree button, though, it will cause the game to crash. I sen a report on this to Apple...

For defeating a tough enemy, take a minimum of 5-6 villagers. Take 3-4 military units for their protection.First of all,destroy 3 blocks of stone walls of enemies.then clear the group of houses(other building) by sending a group of battering rams(Minimum 5) Then type "rock on" and build castle in their area. As the enemy will come to attack it.The arrows will attack it. But remember to garrison all villagers.then move again dense in their territory and build another castle.Like this build many castles,and also near the their town centre and castle.

For easy victory over the CPU under any difficulty setting, place eight to twelve villagers into three control groups. Then, have two control groups working on gold and one working on stone until all of the stone piles and gold piles are gone. Next, build at least two of every building and upgrade everything as fast as possible. If done quick enough you should be able to either swarm your enemy or surround him with castles.

To make a fort which will never, ever be taken by the enemy, you need to set up a game in 'the black forest' as the name sugests, you start in...a very large forest, with a small village depending on what settings you have chosen(i personably would chose death match, as you get lots of resources.) any way, you need to make sure you have a onager, or something whcih can destroy lots of trees very quikely. you then start tunneling into the trees, making walls and gates along the way. put towers with archers behing each gate, and make large areas where you can put castles, barracs, churchs ect and town centres. no matter how hard your enemy tries, they can never get through the walls. this tactic will take about 1 hour.

First you type the gold and stone cheats 20 times so you can have 20,000 gold and stone.Then type the cheat aegis for fast building.Take your villagers and construct towers straight adjacent to each other.Construct as many towers as your can.You don't need to construct gates. Just garrison your inside your tower and ungarrison them outside your kingdom.I constructed bombard towers as my walls and they kept attacking the enemies while i constructed a wonder. The only problem is that siege weapons having range more then 11 can attack your towers without the tower attacking them.If they attack then sent you cavalry to attack them.Units like Ram require to be hit 3 times to be killed. Knights to be hit 1-2 times Swordsman to be hit 1-2 times Monk and villagers 1 time and War Elephants to be hit 2-3 times.Depends on how much armor they have and the type of tower you constructed

use the car to zoom around the map and round up all the sheep. it's best to keep the sheep with the car at all times. if you leave it up to them to get back to camp, the opposite scout may pick them up along the way. if you keep your sheep close, the car will destroy the opponent's scout instead.

(also, be careful you don't completely annihilate your opponent in the beginning, it's not that fun. the sports car will do that if you don't move it out of range fast enough)

3. build a palisade around the inside of your town (just big enough so you can build about 5 houses) and send your scout cavalry to explore the out skirts of your town.

4. Advance to the feudal age and get as many villagers as you can to build a much bigger wall around the outside of your palisade wall (your scout cavalry should have explored around a quarter of the map by now).

5. Start building a giant army and send them to the outskirts of your village and make them stand their ground so they don't start chasing enemies.

6. Attack your nearest enemy and then repeat steps 1,3 and 5.

This is a simple but effective game plan that makes this game really easy.

Keep the palisade walls even though you don't need them and build some every few gaps or so. This helps stop your allies or your enemies from interfering with your current work.Another good idea would be to build lots of towers on the inside of your main wall and scatter a few around inside your village in case some enemy does make it into your village.

Also don't forget to advance all the way to the Imperial age so you can build better units.I managed to defeat 7 players in 45 minutes using this cheat free tactic.